What are Curators?

Ashiya
posted this on March 15, 2011, 1:34 PM

The goal of Geni has always been to create a shared family tree, so our users around the world can meet new cousins and discover how they relate to historical figures as well as well-known contemporary public figures. Geni designated a group of experienced users as Curators to help achieve this goal. Similar to Wikipedia administrators, Geni Curators are volunteer Geni users granted special privileges by Geni to help maintain and improve the quality and accuracy of the Geni World Family Tree.

Geni Curators are specially selected based on their integrity and the quality of their work on Geni. Candidate Curators undergo a nomination and voting process. Accepted Geni Curators are formally appointed and, like Geni Employees, they sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) with the company to ensure they protect data confidentiality.

Curators have the following privileges:

Designate Master Profiles and, optionally, lock them down so that only Curators can edit and merge them.

Add curator notes to profiles to help prevent bad merges and edits.

View and edit any profile including Private Profiles when requested by a user.

Merge any tree unless the tree has never been merged before.

Convert historical living profiles to deceased.

Convert deceased famous and historical profiles to public (if they don't have any close relatives on Geni)

Each of these privileges also contains safeguards to make sure that they are not used irresponsibly, even by accident. As expected, Curators have already had a significant impact on the quality of the data on Geni.